Mobile communications and the Internet are two fields that have developed by leaps and bounds in the past. In this development, the two fields seem to have grown in different directions as different ideas; however, the Internet has become a communication system in many respects, facilitating high-quality audio and even video conferencing. To this end, the Internet has begun to converge into the telephony/voice communication realm. Likewise, telephony begun to converge into the information world once dominated by Internet technologies by offering wireless mobile devices that can access the Internet. Due to disparities in the two technologies, networks are developing from each end to accommodate communication with the other end.
One such network is Third generation (3G) wide area cellular phone networks, which offers robust functionality, such as broadband wireless data access in addition to the wide-area cellular phone service, etc. Some underlying structural improvements exist in the network as well, such as encryption. Where previous cellular phone networks terminated ciphering at the base station (thereby encrypting voice only from the handset to the base station, offering an infiltration point for malicious users at the base station), 3G pushes the cipher termination into a more centralized node of the network providing increased security. Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX, based upon IEEE Standard 802.16) is another broadband wireless access solution that has emerged, which involves deploying wireless metropolitan area networks (WMAN) to create wireless access environments having service spans of up to 31 miles. WiMAX also offers operability with cellular phones to provide voice service over the Internet as well, such as voice over Internet protocol (VoIP). WiMAX utilizes extensible authentication protocol (EAP) to deliver packets from a device, such as a handset, all the way through to the home network, typically by tunneling end-to-end using authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA) protocol, thus terminating ciphering at the base station since the AAA protocol can protect the data within the WiMAX core network.